Subscribe!

Citizen Log Prelude

Trump’s 100 First Days – Citizen Log: Prelude

Much of my life has been dedicated to trying to understand the world I live in. As a technologist, it’s fundamentally important to understand the scope of the human condition if you want to develop tools to enable it to progress. Part of that is understanding how we govern ourselves and one another.

Today, for better or for worse, marks what is actually a significant day in the history of that process. Today begins the first 100 of what will, at least is expected to be 1,472 days of a government administration under the presidency of Donald J. Trump. So I have decided that this deserves a bit of my own personal and completely inconsequential perspective. Why? Because for most of my own journey through the process of understanding the political landscape I have been someone who has had a tendency to explore ideologies and sociological views in ways that most people do not and maybe my experiences and perspectives can help you come to your own conclusions.

So before we begin, let’s flashback to January 20th, 1993 when our POTUS was Bill Clinton. Having grown up in an unabashedly conservative Republican household, that was patriotic enough to use our home as a local poling place, I was, without a doubt far more involved in politics than most my age. I know this because finding people my age to even discuss politics with was near impossible unless of course it was in the smoke filled, dimly lit rooms of the southern California club scene after a punk rock show or the patio of some now long gone coffee house.

I remember the overwhelming sense of hope and potential for things actually being different. My personally disenfranchised and depressingly oppressive upbringing as the son of a minister being the the only white kid in a nearly all-black church, living in a mostly Asian neighborhood always left me feeling like a black sheep. I was the token white kid who didn’t really know what it was to be a white kid. I was, for all intensive purposes, a kid who grew up constantly part of some minority group. The experience pushed me to read a lot and as a result I became fluent in a wide range of political ideologies, especially Marxism, as any intellectual, self educated, punk rocker might have been.

As the dreams of a music career dwindled and the reality of being a graphics artist gave way to the reality of it, I began a journey not only into technology but another one in philosophy. My own socialistic principles became challenged and themselves transformed, slowly but steadily into what one would call classic liberalism. My love of history however began to create a personal conflict with my new found occupation and career path in life having found myself a job working as an information security specialist and multi-media engineer for a defense contractor. Working on a daily basis in the industry of Nuclear Missile Defense and Theater Missile Defense will give you what is called; perspective.

As a result, I ended up reading a lot of the writings of the founding fathers, readings like Common Sense, the Republic of Letters and many more. This was truly when I began to think like a Libertarian even if I hadn’t fully understood it at the time. Issues like Clinton’s support for NAFTA, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act as well as the Kyoto Protocol began to present a view of the world that was something that I believe now, was part of the very real fears that our founding fathers had even in their time.

Then came the Dot Com Boom and just as it’s inevitable bubble burst, there was 9/11, followed by it’s inevitable war, overwhelming social patriotism, the centralization of political power to the globalist movements supported by progressives in both parties. Let there be no confusion, progressives, at their core are socialists Marxists who ultimately believe in the value of a globalized government, which can only occur with the ultimate demise of the existing form of government which traditional American’s believe in. I can say this with certainty because it was that very ideal that I had turned away from when I began to realize the totalitarian result that is the inevitable method of that kind of government.

George W. Bush took office under the premise to end “Nation Building” but the realities of conducting a Global War on Terror were incompatible with those ideals and the ideals of the progressives within the Republican party and their objectives of a New World Order. Now this was, at the time, a clearly conspiracy theorist point of view. I spent the better part of a decade going from being dismissed as a far leftist to a conspiracy theorist. Then came the economic crash of 2007 and globalism, the World Bank and the globalist economy began to falter. The cat was, in a sense, not only out of the bag but the politicians were trying very hard to put them back in.

Unable to do so, Barack Obama took his message of Hope and Change to the people, promising to end the era of conservative, globalist agenda and fundamentally transform America into the progressive ideal of a global member state. In reality, Obama was only really different from Bush in that he simply did much of the same thing and doubled down on it. Obama raised taxes, increased health care costs, increased the national debt. He did nothing about the decline of our aging infrastructure. Immigration reform was simply another promise as it had been for over 30 years. long-term unemployment as a result of NAFTA and technological creative destruction was misdirected to short-term employment subsidies and an increase in our dependency on internationalism and support for the globalist agenda over the interests of our citizenry. Obama failed to win the Global War on Terror despite dropping more bombs than Bush and increasing drone assassinations, enabling the rise of ISIS in the void left behind by Al-Qaeda and a destabilized Middle East.

Polarity has become the theme of nearly every aspect of society in America. Rhetoric on both sides of the isle largely revolve around charges of racism, sexism, corruption, giving rise to a new version of Goodwin’s Law, which itself is almost evidence enough that the public discourse itself has degraded in both substance and substantiation. It’s not surprising that given the public’s ignorance eventually created the demand that Goodwin’s Law worked it’s way into the mainstream media itself. After all, if racism, sexism and every other form of bigotry doesn’t defeat your socio-political opponent, why not use Hitler to paint your enemy as evil?

I however, simply do not see it. I have followed Trump’s campaign. I’m not a supporter, nor did I vote for him, but not for the reasons that he’s a misogynist, a bigot, a fascist or Russian puppet. I didn’t vote for him for a very simple reason, the National Debt. It’s the same reason I wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton either. But just because I didn’t vote for him doesn’t mean he isn’t my President. He is, for better or for worse, the leader of our country and I believe, if a person actually sets aside the highly out-of-context, polarized, hyperbolic, personal attacks against Trump and actually looks at his policies they will find something very different than they have likely been led to believe.

I’m going to try and keep an open mind and look at the issues as they come. Let’s see what happens.